I seem to have heard this stuff since 1945. The moral panic, the frontier gibberish, the drift to the right. Time to man up, time to get tough, time to get the army or the famous in. Like Alistair Campbell, or the ubiquitous Katharine Birbasingh, who's got a book to flog*.

My goodness, she's fierce. But she does hit nerves, my bleedin' heart liberal nerves. She's on it – the grim curriculum, Ofsted goons, and smug middle-class hypocrisies. I can only concur.

Then she embraces the modern mantra that there are "no excuses" for failing any pupil from any background, from Cordelia Swansong to Dave Mania. Poverty is no excuse. Nor is home background.

There he goes, with his football in a Tesco bag, through the wastes of the Westway, past the toxic canal at Kensal Rise, and the incinerators with the EDL daubings, and into the dark car park with its dead air and crushed Stellas and staffies on strings and the odd needle and skinny girls with cancelled faces and cropped thugs who mutter into mobiles and deal in oblivion and menace.

Come on. Keep going. No eye contact.

Such an unkind universe.

Watch him punch the code and get into the lift with the epileptic lights. Up to the 17th floor and through the triple-locked door and into a tiny room with his mother, who is gaunt and pale and beaten before the white noise of the TV.

There are no books here and no solace, space or privacy. So he looks at walls and goes to bed and fails to sleep and listens to grime music and has nightmares and is late for school next morning and is yelled at by Ms Fierce, because there can be "no excuses".

No excuses? Don't be daft. Too much damage has been done to Dave. He lives in what psychotherapist Camilla Batmanghelidjh calls a "chemistry of terror". I can't teach him. His anger and rage run me ragged.

No excuses? There can be no excuses for doing what we've done to Dave Mania – or for trashing his teachers. He's way beyond me, way beyond Birbalsingh's tough, unkind love. And there are a lot of Dave Manias out there.